Emergent Hydrodynamic Mode on SU(2) Plaquette Chains and Quantum Simulation

Abstract

We search for emergent hydrodynamic modes in real-time Hamiltonian dynamics of $2+1$-dimensional SU(2) lattice gauge theory on a quasi one dimensional plaquette chain, by numerically computing symmetric correlation functions of energy densities on lattice sizes of about $20$ with the local Hilbert space truncated at $j_{\max }=\frac{1}{2}$. Because of the Umklapp processes, we only find a mode for energy diffusion. The symmetric correlator exhibits transport peak near zero frequency with a width approximately proportional to momentum squared at small momentum, when the system is fully quantum ergodic, as indicated by the eigenenergy level statistics. This transport peak leads to a power-law $t^{-\frac{1}{2}}$ decay of the symmetric correlator at late time, also known as the long-time tail, as well as diffusion-like spreading in position space. We also introduce a quantum algorithm for computing the symmetric correlator on a quantum computer and find it gives results consistent with exact diagonalization when tested on the IBM emulator. Finally we discuss the future prospect of searching for the sound modes.

Comments: 15 pages, 7 figures; v2: corrected some typos